Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Besides all this, institutes that were working on the problems of atomic energy were under the control of a special Counterintelligence Department. It was created within the NKGB/MGB in 1945 (Department “K”); after several reorganizations, it became the KGB First Special Department (1954–1959), then the KGB Fifth Directorate (1959–1960), and finally, its functions were transferred under the KGB Second Main Directorate. 158Evidently, this department collected materials from informers among scientists: The recently published secret “Report on Academician Lev Davydovich Landau,” signed by head of the KGB First Special Department Ivanov and dated December 19, 1957, was based completely on the materials from scientist-informers. 159As for Academician Frank, as a KGB expert, he would have had his own connection with this organization.

The obedience of Dr. Frank to orders from the Communist Party was absolute. On August 29, 1973, a letter against Academician Sakharov, with the signatures of forty scientists, was published in the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda . 160The letter stated that Sakharov’s “utterances align him with highly reactionary circles that are working against peaceful coexistence among nations, and against the policies of our Party and state designed to promote scientific and cultural cooperation and world peace.” 161Signing the letter against Sakharov was a test of academicians’ loyalty to the “Party line.” Dr. Frank, who had signed the letter, did not see his name in the newspaper. Terrified, he went to the secretary of the academy to find out the extent of the intrigue against him. The secretary assured him that it was simply a printer’s error. 162

The last opponent, Dr. Nikolai Gavrilov, was definitely Mairanovsky’s colleague. He was director of the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT) or a “post office [a name used in the USSR for secret facilities] No. 702” located at 23 Shosse Entuziastov in Moscow. 163A plant for the production of such chemical weapons as mustard gas and lewisite was hidden behind the scientific-sounding name of this organization. Apparently, this was a successor of the Olgin Chemical Plant of the 1920s–1930s. Experiments on humans were a routine part of this “institute’s” work. Formally, the experiments were said to be performed on “volunteers.” The “volunteers” were young rural men who were desperately trying to escape from their villages (where there was hunger and no work), hoping to receive permission to live and work in Moscow (which was not allowed for villagers). 164In exchange for permission to live in Moscow at the plant’s hostel and to work at the “institute,” as well as receiving a very small fee, these “volunteers” were glad to allow a chemical to be applied to their skin or to receive an injection. The experimenters did not tell them that the application or injection could result in cancer or other terrible diseases.

The list of names of Mairanovsky’s thesis opponents clearly shows that specialists who knew about Mairanovsky’s experiments were officially respectable scientists who eventually became high-ranking members in the hierarchy of the Academy of Sciences and the Medical Academy. In fact, some of them have since become widely known in the Western scientific community. Besides these scientists, there were the members of the Scientific Council who listened to Mairanovsky’s presentation of his dissertation. It seems that the number of specialists who knew and understood what was going on was rather large. Not one of the scientists and doctors who knew about Mairanovsky’s work asked him about the objects of his experiments or how his data had been obtained. Even much later, Academician Blokhin did not ask these questions, although it was evident that the results, which were described by Mairanovsky in his letter to Blokhin, must have been obtained by experimenting on human beings. It was their moral choice and a compromise with their conscience to play a role in Mairanovsky’s crimes.

Due to the specific nature of the work of Mairanovsky, Muromtsev, and their colleagues, research facilities of this sort are still secret. However, after Stalin’s death some of the secret MGB-KGB institutes were declassified and their heads became academicians. Academician Sergei Zhuk is a good example of such a scientist. 165

Zhuk started his career as one of the organizers of the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction project, the first such Soviet project (1931–1934) to involve hundreds of thousands of prisoners. It is estimated that 200,000 prisoners died during the construction of this canal. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mentioned Zhuk as one of “6 main murderers each of whom accounted for thirty thousand lives” (the other five were NKVD-Gulag officials). 166In 1940, Zhuk was appointed deputy head of the NKVD Main Directorate of Camps for Hydrotechnical Construction (Glavgidrostroi). 167On October 24, 1941, Glavgidrostroi was reorganized into the Department for Hydrotechnical Construction within the NKVD Main Directorate of Camps for Industrial Construction (Glavpromstroi or GULPS), and Zhuk became head of this department. On March 13, 1950, a new MVD Directorate for Projecting, Planning, and Research (Gidroproekt), again headed by Major General Zhuk, was established. Gidroproekt existed in the MVD system until the reorganizations of the MVD and MGB following Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. Another “main murderer” of the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction, Major General Yakov Rapoport, became deputy director of Zhuk’s institute when he retired from the MVD in 1956. 168

Between 1947 and 1951, Glavgidrostroi and Volgostroi (another system of MVD labor camps) was in charge of the construction of the Volga-Don Canal, which connected the Volga and Don Rivers. 169Chief Engineer Zhuk received a special high salary for managing the slave labor on this project. 170After the reorganization of Glavgidrostroi in the late 1950s, Zhuk continued his career as a member of the Academy of Sciences (elected in 1953). 171The construction plans for the dams and canals that caused so much environmental damage to the Volga, Angara, and Yenisei river basins were developed under his guidance at this institute. Praise for people like Zhuk continues in Russia today.

For instance, in 1993, the official journal of the Russian Academy, Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk , congratulated geologist Academician Nikolai Shilo on his eightieth birthday. 172A short biography written in the style of the Brezhnev period declares that “besides his scientific research work, N. A. Shilo made a tremendous contribution to the organization of science in the northeastern region of the country [Russia].” It was not explained that Shilo started his career in the Far East as a high-ranking functionary of the MVD system in charge of countless gold-mining labor camps. In 1949, he was appointed director of the All-Union Research Institute One for Gold and Rare Metals (VNII-1), one of the main branches of the MVD system in the Soviet Far East. 173In Stalin’s Russia, the geographic names Magadan and Kolyma, where Shilo worked, were the predecessors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The writer Georgii Demidov, who spent fourteen years in several of the worst Kolyma labor camps, named Kolyma “Oswiecim [Auschwitz] without ovens.” 174Shilo’s biography also mentions him as “an honorable citizen of the city of Magadan and the city of Winnipeg (Canada),” as well as “an honorable Doctor of Science of Ohio State University” (apparently he received an honorary degree there as a consequence of some joint scientific project during Soviet times).